You Can Get Anything You Want From Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”

I don’t seriously celebrate Thanksgiving anymore, and I haven’t for seven or eight years—not since all of my grandparents passed away and I became estranged from most of my extended family. I keep the flame alive, though, through my two yearly traditions that I’ve hung onto since college: Every Thanksgiving morning, I listen to “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” and every Thanksgiving night, I watch The Last Waltz. For a long time, Thanksgiving weekend was simply what separated the rest of the year from the month where I watch Home Alone at least once every day until Christmas—but that’s another story entirely. I was turned onto “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” in high school by a pal of mine who really loved Arlo Guthrie and his song “Coming into Los Angeles.” I’d heard “The Motorcycle Song” in the Kurt Cobain documentary About a Son and liked it and the way Arlo sang “I don’t wanna die” very much. Nowadays, his cover of Steve Goodman’s “The City of New Orleans” is one of my favorite songs.

The part of Thanksgiving that is worth hanging onto are the traditions that it nurtures. Once upon a time, the holiday was like a Norman Rockwell painting. There was the Macy’s Day Parade that I watched less and less of each year, tuning in for Santa’s appearance at the festivity’s finale without paying much attention to the big, colorful floats. Oh, the smell of turkey wafting into a living room full of sweater-clad men—and the way most of those men would stop coming to Thanksgiving and start spending the holiday hunting down in West Virginia instead—I can still hear the laughter and how our restlessness would swell with each passing minute after three o’clock. There was the dinner itself, which we ate at my grandma’s very old and very beautiful but rarely used dining table, and there was the grace I never had to say. I was a chubby little spitfuck glutton back then, shoveling mac ‘n’ cheese into my mouth before the prayer. I don’t remember a lick of conversation any of us ever had at those dinners, but I do remember being nine or ten and filling up on pumpkin roll while my mom, grandma and aunt played Scattergories. I ached to join them, but I settled for watching football games.

I hold all of those traditions close, if only because I cannot live inside of them anymore—only with them. But I love somebody who loves Thanksgiving, and perhaps that is why I listen to “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” every Thanksgiving morning, even when there’s not going to be a dinner waiting for me at four o’clock. It’s a funny song, yes, but it’s also a memory. It, like Thanksgiving, is a routine—a gateway into conversation, into keeping in touch. The holiday’s song canon is small, but so is our lifetime for loving. The truth of the song is stretched out, but it still happened—even if Arlo Guthrie wrote him and Alice (remember, it’s a song about Alice) and Robbins into a predicament no one else lived through. My Thanksgivings probably look like fictions to anyone else who was there for them, because we all remember ourselves differently, but I was there once, reminiscing with people who ate the same kind of food and shared the same kind of affections and conversations with each other for much longer than I ever did.

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” went from a recounting of ludicrous, small-town events into an 18-and-a-half-minute, satirical spectacle “with full orchestration and five-part harmony” about the tragedy of two litter bugs who become convicts and ineligible for the military draft. The song, a Piedmont blues ragtime guitar arrangement backing an Ozark Mountains-inspired skinny of impossibility, is a stand-up act, a bedtime story, a Vietnam War protest and a small-town folktale recorded live with a participating audience. Arlo Guthrie’s rambling, deadpan delivery and “circuitous telling” of superfluous details makes it something of a “shaggy dog story”—a tune bearing a striking similarity (in humor and in application) to Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” a talking blues masterpiece inspired by a real news story: A Harlem social club hired a boat, the Hudson Belle, for a Father’s Day picnic at Bear Mountain State Park and, upon too many forged tickets being sold and the boat arriving late, there were two-dozen injuries. Dylan, naturally, turned a tiny newspaper clipping into a laugh-track of human greed and “6,000 people tryin’ to kill each other.”

In the prologue, Arlo begins with some proactive fact-checking: “This song is called ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ and it’s about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that’s just the name of the song.” He turns the chorus into a jingle (“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. Walk right in, it’s around the back, just a half-a-mile from the railroad track”) and segues into the very story I told you earlier, what with the illegal dumping and the phone call from Officer Obie and the arrest. But the truth of the “massacree” becomes exaggerated, as Arlo instead wrote that he and Robbins were caught because Obie “found [his] name on an envelope at the bottom of a half-a-ton of garbage.” His protracted, spoken monologue walks in tandem with fingerstyle picking and a brush-on-snare drum percussion done by an uncredited drummer. Arlo’s chugging, looping guitar is, like himself, Alice and Robbins, is a character in the story, too.

Parts of the garbage become forensic evidence, including tire tracks, fingerprints and “twenty-seven 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.” The town newspaper (and other towns’ newspapers) swarm the police station looking for a scoop, and Obie removes everything from Arlo’s cell—including his wallet, toilet seat, toilet paper and his belt, the latter of which so there won’t be any “hangings”—and keeps him there until Alice (of the restaurant) comes by to bail him out. Together, they go back home to the church and eat a second Thanksgiving dinner “that couldn’t be beat.” The next morning, they stand trial but the judge, who walks with a seeing-eye dog, foils Obie’s case with “American blind justice” because he cannot see the evidence they’ve collected.

All of that was written by Arlo with Alice (Remember Alice?) and Ray in the room, but the second chapter of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” came together after Guthrie left Stockbridge, as every event unfolded before him. But that’s not what I came to tell you about, Arlo tells the audience. “Came to talk about the draft.” He’d already made the papers—the Berkshire Eagle, specifically—for his littering. What if his actions followed him elsewhere? What if the rest of the world knew! Well, he sings about the draft board deciding not to send him to the military because of his arrest. In fact, his arrest record did disqualify him from the draft in real life, too (but he was probably never going to go to Vietnam, because he was given a high draft number). After getting “good and drunk” the night prior, he went down to a building in New York City at 39 Whitehall Street, where he was “injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected” and was “hung down, brung down, hung up and all kind of mean, nasty, ugly things.” Arlo sees a psychiatrist in room 604 and, posing as a homicidal maniac, tells him he wants to “KILL!” “I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead, burnt bodies.” A sergeant comes into the room, looks him up and down, “pin[s] a medal” on him and reaches a conclusion: “You’re out boy.”

And Arlo sits on a bench with the crime-type rejects of Group W—the mother rapers, father stabbers and father rapers—and they all avoid him like the plague upon finding out he got busted tossing garbage off a cliff. “And creating a nuisance!” Arlo adds, and the rejects return to him, shake his hand and have “a great time on the bench, talkin’ about crime, mother-stabbing, father-raping, and all kinds of groovy things” while smoking cigarettes. The sergeant makes the crime-types fill out paperwork about the whens and whys and hows of their crimes, and there’s a question on the back of the form that reads (in parentheses, capital letters and quotations: “Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?”

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” isn’t like the most famous anti-Vietnam songs of its day, because it effortlessly points out the absurdity of the American military-industrial complex. It’s a damn enjoyable portrait of governmental lunacy, conformity and patriotism. It’s against war as a societal default, and that makes it the protest song we remember it as. You can tell a shrink that you’re blood-thirsty for murder, but if the military checks your arrest record and finds even the faintest demerit, you’re no longer fit to slaughter. “You want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug?” Arlo asks the sergeant, upon being questioned about his time spent in the joint. “He looked at me and said, ‘Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington.’”

Now, Arlo says, what if one person goes to their shrink and sings the “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” chorus? Well, that shrink might think that person is sick, twisted and unfit for the military. If two people do it (in harmony, specifically), the Army might think they’re a couple of queers (not that there’s anything wrong with that, Arlo would sing during later performances) and won’t take either of them. But, if three people do it, the Army might call that an “organization.” But if an organization of fifty or a hundred or a thousand people sing “Alice’s Restaurant” to their shrinks, the military “may think it’s a movement.” All you gotta do to join is sing that chorus the “next time it comes around on the guitar.” Near the end of the performance, Arlo Guthrie tells his audience that “if you want to end war and stuff, you got to sing loud.” The rounds of laughter turn into a brilliant singalong. It all feels real. Most of it already was, except some of it wasn’t.

The story goes that Arlo Guthrie gave a demo of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” to his death bed-ridden father. There’s a joke in the Guthrie family that it was the last thing Woody listened to before he died in October 1967, the month it came out. Richard Nixon was a fan of the song, despite its critiques of the very war Tricky Dick supported. Keen historians may also notice that the runtime of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” matches the length of the gap in Nixon’s Watergate tapes. And somewhere in Washington, there’s a “little folder” with Arlo’s fingerprints in black and white. All of it feels a little whacky and a little too good to be true, but, then again, so does Thanksgiving. I don’t know what it takes to make this holiday special anymore, but somebody is cooking a turkey for me today. Alice is gone but Alice remains. Maybe I’ll have a laugh and watch the parade, or check the football game scores, or finally renew my DSA membership in her honor. Remember Alice? This is an essay about Alice, with four-part harmony and feeling. Somewhere, families I have not met yet are saying grace but I will meet them soon. There are songs still left to be sung, chances to be taken, garbage to be tossed and people to love.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.